


turns out michael bolton is a major cinephile

by thegatorgood



Category: Hot Fuzz (2007)
Genre: M/M, yeah we've seen the movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-22 21:03:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21083069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegatorgood/pseuds/thegatorgood
Summary: Danny frowned.  Was this how failing a test felt?  Nicholas had never failed a test before, but he still had no taste in police films that didn't involve Danny handing him something and telling him to put it in the DVD player.  He had no idea what differentiated a good cop film from a bad cop film, not in Danny's mind, at least.





	turns out michael bolton is a major cinephile

**Author's Note:**

> FOR TROPE 32 - STAKEOUTS/SURVEILLANCE. -\\_(:/)_/-

Nicholas checked the curtains. Many officers didn't appreciate the exact arrangement of curtains on a surveillance operation: open enough to see out, but not be spotted, through, and not closed enough to look suspicious. 

"You want a line of sight," he told Danny, who was sitting in the armchair, binoculars on the table, phone in hand.

"This isn't my first stakeout," said Danny.

"Sorry," said Nicholas, and he was. Danny had been cleared to return to work last month, but only for desk, not active, duty. Occasionally he'd stand up too fast, or shift in his seat, and grimace as the movement tugged at his scars, and Nicholas, watching him, would feel a spike of pain. And of course Danny didn't have the appetite for paperwork that Nicholas himself did, so Nicholas sat and filled out forms with him whenever he was at their ersatz station in what was left of the Crown. Still, he was afraid Danny might be getting bored, and then this case had come along at the right time, and he didn't want to put Danny off his first chance of action in a long time by implying that Danny wasn't up to the job.

Danny wasn't offended, though. "Hey, did you get night vision goggles?"

Nicholas smiled and shook his head. "I don't think Requisitions is taking this very seriously. There is a street lamp."

"Shame," said Danny. "What stakeout gear _did_ they give us?"

Nicholas brought it all out: the camera, the two-way radio, the frozen pizzas and the readymade salads from the shops. A pack of lager, even though he normally didn't approve of drinking on the job. Cornettos. "And," he said, and upended his messenger bag on the bed so the DVDs clattered out in a pile, "I picked these up for the lulls."

Danny frowned. Was this how failing a test felt? Nicholas had never failed a test before, but he still had no taste in police films that didn't involve Danny handing him something and telling him to put it in the DVD player. He had no idea what differentiated a good cop film from a bad cop film, not in Danny's mind, at least. "I'm not supposed to be watching movies, though, am I? I'm supposed to be watching out the window."

"Well," said Nicholas. "I thought, when it's my turn--"

"What?" Danny caught up, beamed. "You didn't say you were staying."

"Of course I'm staying." He didn't know when he'd decided that. Long before they were huddled together in the Model Village and the Chief Inspector was asking him to come back to London. Nicholas had just known he was never leaving Danny again--and then when he'd nearly lost him-- He was _never_ leaving Danny again. "We don't know how long it will take. You'll have to sleep some of the time, and you'll have to--relieve yourself."

Danny was already fiddling with the camera. "Sergeant Fisher's got one of those things, you know, where you stick one end of a tube over your cock and whenever you need to go, you piss into it and the tube takes it to a bag you can put beside your seat."

Nicholas knew he should not be thinking of Danny's cock, even in that context, so he grabbed on to the very least sexy part of that sentence and chased it like it was a suspect fleeing the scene. "I didn't know Sergeant Fisher took part in surveillance missions."

"He doesn't," said Danny. He aimed the camera between the curtains and took a picture of the scene of once and future crimes. "It's for when he goes on holiday and has to spend more than two hours on a train or plane." 

"I see." And badly wished he didn't. "But it wouldn't be necessary for this assignment anyway. Because there's two of us."

"Yeah," said Danny, smiling. "Yeah, there is. Hey, take the chair for a second, let me see waht you got."

Nicholas took the chair. He could still feel Danny's body heat on the cushions and he felt a bit flushed himself as he ducked his head to check out the window. Everything was still, quiet. The bins were lined up in an orderly row: rubbish, recycling, compost. No nefarious plotting was afoot. There was a bloody mess in Mrs Butcher's garden from her habit of feeding the local crows, but that wasn't against the law. Off-putting, but not against the law.

Nicholas shuddered and turned back to Danny, who'd chosen a movie and was putting it on. 

"This is brilliant," he said. Maybe he could tell that Nicholas was watching him, pained at the way he now moved to avoid jolting his wounds. Nicholas wanted to get up, to help him, but he remained rooted in the squashy armchair. It was awkward. It had been awkward, when he'd visited Danny in hospital, helping him sit up, fluffing his pillows. Nicholas had been too aware that he'd been touching Danny more than was strictly necessary, reassuring himself that Danny was alive, memorizing the feel of his skin, the smell of his hair. He hadn't taken advantage, but he'd done far more than he'd have done for any other colleague--

He had to be calm. Professional. Nicholas had earned multiple commendations for conducting himself professionally under pressure. Five, to be exact. They were in a box in his cottage's entry hall closet along with his other commendations. It was an embarrassingly large box.

"--if our perp looks up from the street, all they'll see is the light and they'll think it's just someone watching telly, not someone watching them," Danny finished.

"Yeah," Nicholas agreed, not about to admit _I did it for you._

"--here we go." Danny grabbed the remote and pushed Play. "Budge over, I'm first shift."

Nicholas surrendered the chair with a token protest of, "Don't you want to watch the film?"

"I can see it from here," said Danny, waving the remote as if to make his point. "Besides, I've already seen it three times."

Oh. "If I'd known--"

"I wouldn't mind seeing it a fourth time."

"Oh." He supposed that anything Danny wanted to watch a fourth time was something Danny enjoyed, so maybe he had passed the test.

"You just going to stand there until it's your watch?" Danny asked, and Nicholas realized he was hovering at the edge of the chair. His fingertips were scant inches from Danny's shoulder. He didn't want to move but he also didn't want Danny to think he was still there because he didn't think Danny could do the mission. Because Danny could.

"Oh," said Nicholas again. "Sorry, I was--"

"Miles away. Or yards, at any rate." Danny gestured across the street. "Go on, watch the movie with me. Have a beer while you're at it."

Nicholas supposed his nerves could use one. And he wasn't technically on duty until they swapped shifts. "All right."

But it didn't help. Nor did lying on the bed. The film didn't hold his attention either--he made a mental list, as usual, of which laws were being broken and by whom, and the forms the leads would have to fill out afterwards, but he was still distracted by--

"All right," said Danny.

Nicholas nearly dropped the mostly full lager can. "What?"

"You can join me, you know."

"What?" 

Danny rolled his eyes. "You keep glancing at the window, like you can't actually do a stakeout if you're not actively staking out."

It wasn't the window he was looking at. He'd probably have been able to concentrate on the film if Danny had been sitting next to him on the bed, or lying next to him on the bed. No, not lying next to him on the bed. "This was your assignment. I don't mean to--"

"'m not offended," said Danny. "I'm just wondering how that worked the time you were watching those drug dealers for three days." Nicholas should never have told Danny about that. "Did you ever sleep? Did you go to the loo or did you have one of Sergeant Fisher's--"

"I'd really rather not talk about that." The arms of the armchair were quite large. Nicholas still balanced precariously by Danny's shoulder, his own arm slung across the chair's back. 

"Still," said Danny, looking up at him, "you caught them in the end, didn't you?"

"Yeah."

Danny sighed and lay his head back, his hair tickling the crook of Nicholas's elbow. "You know," he said, "I'm glad this is only someone putting waste in the compost bins."

"Not only," said Nicholas. 

"Yeah, yeah. Andy says they're contaminating a few hundred tons of compost. But it's not, you know. Dangerous."

"It could be." People were relying on that compost to fertilize their farms. Who knew what kind of outbreak could be caused by contaminated fertilizer. It could be worse than hoof and mouth disease, although perhaps Nicholas was exaggerating the danger as a result of all those zombie films Danny had talked him into watching.

Danny sighed and patted Nicholas on the cheek. Nicholas might have thought himself ready for anything, but he clearly wasn't ready for that. "I meant dangerous to us. I feel kind of bad about the whole what was it like being stabbed line of questioning. If someone asked me waht it was like being shot I'd probably tell them to fuck off."

"I'm sure it was a great deal more painful than being stabbed," said Nicholas. Being stabbed in the hand had been relegated to the third or fourth most painful experience in his life. The first had been seeing Danny shot, seeing Danny bleeding. Trying desperately to push the statistics out of his head, the chance that Danny might not make it.

"I guess," said Danny. "And then we got the building dropped on us."

"Yeah," said Nicholas. He really, really didn't like to think about it, and then there was a massive explosion of sound from the television and Nicholas flinched and wobbled and his training took over, and instead of falling back onto the floor and possibly hurting himself, he toppled onto Danny's lap.

It was approximately eight point five seconds before he realized he should not _stay_ in Danny's lap, but then Nicholas worried that he might hurt Danny's scars in moving away. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"Am _I_ all right?" said Danny, and tucked a hand around the back of Nicholas's neck. "_You_ just went full PTSD on me."

Nicholas could feel every one of his fingers. He could feel Danny's legs on the insides of his calves and thighs. It was likely that things were going to get awkward.

His lips were dry. He licked them. "I'd forgotten the film was playing."

"Yeah, it's a bit loud." Danny stroked along his shoulders in a soothing manner. "We can turn the volume down."

"Er," said Nicholas. He couldn't have moved to grab the remote if his life depended on it, but he didn't want Danny moving either. He wanted Danny to keep touching him like this, no matter how loud the explosions were.

"I mean, I've seen it before and--"

Nicholas kissed Danny. It might not have been strategically sound and it may have been contrary to regulations concerning fraternization, but in that moment it was the only thing he could do.

The remote fell to the carpet with a thud. Danny's hand cupped the back of his neck. Neither of them said anything; they didn't have to. Nicholas might have expected there was a certain muscle memory to it, that in his experience his liminal system took charge of it: the press of lip to lip, the movement of body against body, the careful navigation of shared physical space. But there was no muscle memory for this. Every touch, every kiss, every misplacement of his nose, was something new and delightful to him, because it was _Danny_.

And then Danny was shoving him off and Nicholas felt like he'd been stabbed all over again. "I'm sorry," he began, "that was grossly inappropriate--"

But Danny was grabbing the radio. "Andy," he said, "we have movement."

"Roger that," came the reply.

Nicholas could hear it now, a bin lid falling, another being propped open, and something that definitely wasn't compost being dumped into the compost. And then a shout of "Tosser!" and a scuffle as D. S. Wainwright tackled the perpetrator to the ground.

"Oh," he said. The stakeout. Their mission. Right.

"Did you forget?" Danny asked, as Nicholas reached over and toggled off the radio, which was now emitting a steady stream of profanity. "Did you forget what we were here for, while we were snogging?"

Nicholas did not want to admit professional failure, especially in front of Danny, who'd been so impressed by Nicholas's commitment to and competence at the job. Danny had believed in Nicholas. To admit that a kiss--several kisses and a bit of--had been enough to undo him--

But Danny's hand was now on Nicholas's face, and his voice reverential. "You switched it off."

He glanced down, feeling guilty. They were still on the clock, whether the perpetrator had been caught or not. "Yes. I didn't feel that this was the sort of conversation D. S. Wainwright needed to be a part of."

"Not the radio," said Danny, and tapped at Nicholas's forehead. _"This."_

Nicholas used to be able to remember Janine's speech about his inability to switch off word for word. _Until you find someone you care about more than the job_, she'd said, and Nicholas finally had. He should have noticed it from the first, the day of Leslie Tiller's murder, but it'd taken him a few days to make the connection. It wasn't that he'd had other things on his mind--there was _always_ something going on--but that he'd rarely had cause to turn his observational skills on his own emotions. "Yes."

"Do I do that for you?" asked Danny. 

"Yes." If anything, Nicholas had trouble _not_ switching off when he was around Danny. It could have been dangerous, but it turned out that Danny was an amazing police officer, and Nicholas was safe in his hands. They both were.

A grin broke out on Danny's face. "Yes!" he said, and pumped one arm. Nicholas nearly fell off his lap again. "Hey, how long do we have this room for?"

"Thirty-six hours with an option to renew," Nicholas said faintly, almost by rote. "It's not a misuse of police resources provided that we--"

"--do the paperwork here," finished Danny, and began to unbutton Nicholas's vest. "After the mandatory work break, of course."

"Of course." Nicholas couldn't have said it better himself.


End file.
